It was Saturday night, and the pavement sparkled with frost
diamonds under flashing lights and echoing steps in the opera
quarter. Tinkling carnival bells and wild singing resounded from
all the carriages dashing towards Rue Lepelletier; the shops were
only half shut, and Paris, wide awake, reveled in a fairy-night
frolic.
And yet, Felix d'Aubremel, one of the bright applauded heroes of
those orgies, seemed in no mood to answer their mad challenge.
Plunged in a deep armchair, hands drooping and feet on the
fender, he was sunk in sombre revery. An open book lay near him,
and a letter was flung, furiously crumpled, on the floor.
An orphan at the age of twelve, Felix had watched his mother's
slow death through ten years of suffering. The Marquis Gratien
d'Aubremel, ruined by reckless dissipation, and driven by
necessity, rather than love, into a marriage with an English
heiress, Margaret Malden, deserted her, like the wretch he was,
as soon as the last of her dowry melted away. A common story
enough, and ending in as common a close. D'Aubremel sailed for
the Indies to retrieve his fortune, and met death there by yellow
fever. So that the sad lessons of Felix's family life stimulated
to excess his innate leaning towards misanthropy--if that name
may define a resistless urgency of belief in the appearances of
evil, linked with a doubt of the reality of good. Probably, at
heart, he believed himself incapable of a bad action, but he
would take no oath to such a conviction, since by his theory
every man must yield under certain circumstances, attacking
powerfully his personal interest, while threatening slight danger
of failure or detection. This style of thought, set off by a fair
share of witty expression and ever-ready impertinence, gave Felix
a kind of ascendancy in his circle of intimates--but naturally
it gained him no friends. Common reputation grows out of words
rather than actions, and Felix suffered the just penalty of his
sceptical fancies. They cost him more than they were worth, as he
had just learned by sad experience.
He had chanced to make the acquaintance of a rich manufacturer,
Montmorot by name, whose daughter Ernestine was pleased with
the devotion of a charming young fellow, who mingled the rather
reckless grace of French cleverness with a reserved style and
refined pride gained from the English blood of the Maldens.
For his part, Felix really loved the girl, and had let his
impatience, that very day, carry him into a step that failed to
move the elder Montmorot's inflexibility. He refused absolutely
to give his daughter to a man without fortune or prospects. Felix
was crushed, his hopes all shattered at a blow, by this answer,
though he had a thousand reasons to expect it. And at what a
moment! A half-unfolded red ticket, stuffed with disgusting
threats, peeped out from between the wall and his sofa. The
officers of justice had paid him a little visit. He got into a
passion with himself.
"Pshaw," he cried, "confound all scruples! If I had been less in
love I should be Ernestine's husband now. With a pretty wife, one
I am so fond of, too, I should have fortune, position, and the
luxury indispensable to my life--now, I don't know where to lay
my head to-morrow. To-morrow, at ten o'clock, the sheriff will
seize everything--everything, from that Troyou sketch to that
china monster, nodding his frightful sneering head at me. They
will carry off this casket that was my father's--this locket,
with the hair of--of--what the deuce was her name? Poor girl! how
she loved me! And now all that is left of her vanishes--even her
name!
"What, nothing? no hope? Not even one of those silly impulses
that used to drive me out into the streets when everybody else
was abed, with the firm conviction that at some crossing, in some
gutter, some unknown deity must have dropped a fat pocket-book,
on purpose for me! I believed in something, then--even in lost
pocket-books. And now, now! I would commit no such follies as
that, but I believe I could be guilty of even worse things,
if crime, common, low, contemptible, shameful crime, were not
forbidden to the son of the Marquis d'Aubremel and Margaret
Malden.
"Oh, great genius!" he went on, taking up the open book near him,
"great philosopher, called a sophist by the ignorant--how deep a
truth you uttered in writing these lines, that I never read
over without a shudder: 'Imagine a Chinese mandarin, living in a
fabulous country three thousand leagues away, whom you have never
seen and shall never see--imagine, moreover, that the death
of this mandarin, this man, almost a myth, would make you a
millionaire, and that you have but to lift your finger, at home,
in France, to bring about his death, without the possibility of
ever being called to account for it by any one; say, what would
you do?'
"That fearful passage must have made many men dream--and does
not Bianchon, that great materialist, so well painted by Balzac,
confess that he has got as far as his thirty-third mandarin? What
a St. Bartholomew of mandarins, if my philosopher's supposition
could grow into a truth!"
Felix ceased his soliloquy, and bent his head to let the storm
raised in his soul by the atheist philosopher pass over. His bad
instincts, aroused, spoke louder at that instant than reason,
louder than reality. His glance fell on the chimney-piece, where
a porcelain figure, the grotesque _chef d'oeuvre_ of some great
Chinese artist, leered at him with its everlasting grin.
The young man smiled. "Perhaps that is the likeness of a
mandarin--bulbous nose, hanging cheeks, moustaches drooping
like plumes, a peaked head, knotty hands--a regular deformity.
Reflecting on the ugliness of that idiotic race, there is much to
be urged by way of excuse for people who kill mandarins."
Some persistent thought evidently haunted Felix's mind. Again he
drove it off, and again it beset him.
"Pshaw!" he exclaimed, after a last brief struggle, "I am alone,
and out of sorts. I will amuse myself with a carnival freak, a
mere theoretic and philosophic piece of nonsense. I have tried
many worse ones. It wants a quarter to twelve. I give myself
fifteen minutes to study my spells. Let me see, what mandarin
shall I murder? I don't know any, and I have no peerage list of
the Flowery Empire. Let me try the newspapers."
It was in the height of the English war with China. On the
seventh column of the paper our hero found a proclamation signed
by the imperial commissioners, Lin, Lou, Lun, and Li.
"Here goes for Li," he said to himself. "He is likely to be the
youngest."
The clock began to strike, announcing the hour. Felix placed
himself solemnly before the mirror, and said aloud, in a
grave tone: "If the death of Mandarin Li will make me rich
and powerful, whatever may come of it, I vote for the death of
Mandarin Li." He lifted his finger--at that instant the porcelain
figure rocked on its base, and fell in fragments at Felix's feet.
The glass reflected his startled face. He thrilled for an instant
with superstitious terror, but recollecting that his finger had
touched the fragile figure, he accounted for it as an accident,
and went to bed and to such repose as a debtor can enjoy with an
execution hanging over his head.
Masks and dominos made the street merry under his window. The
opera ball was unusually brilliant, experts said, and nothing
made the Parisians aware that on the night of January 12th, 1840,
Felix d'Aubremel had passed sentence of death on Chinaman Li, son
of Mung, son of Tseu, a literate mandarin of the 114th class.
Nine months later Felix d'Aubremel was living in furnished
lodgings in an alley off the Rue St. Pierre, and living by
borrowing. The gentlemanly sceptic owed his landlady a good deal
of money; his clothes were aged past wearing, and his tailor
had long ago broken off all relations with him. The Marquis
d'Aubremel was within a hairsbreadth of that utterly crushed
state that ends in madness, or in suicide--which is only a
variety of madness.
One morning while sitting in the glass cage that leads to the
staircase of every lodging-house, waiting to beg another respite
from his landlady, he took up a newspaper, and the following
notice was lucky enough to catch his attention.
"Chiusang, 12th January, 1840. Hostilities have broken out
between England and the Celestial Empire. The sudden and
inexplicable death of Mandarin Li, the only member of the council
who opposed the violent and warlike projects of Lin, led to
unfortunate events. At the first attack the Chinese fled, with
the basest want of pluck, but in their retreat they murdered
several English merchants, and among them an old resident,
Richard Maiden, who leaves an estate of half a million sterling.
The heirs of the deceased are requested to communicate with
William Harrison, Solicitor, Lincoln's Inn."
"My uncle!" cried Felix. "Alas, I have killed my uncle and
Mandarin Li."
He had not a penny to pay for his traveling expenses to London;
but, on producing his certificate of birth and the newspaper
article, his landlady easily negotiated for him with an honest
broker, who advanced him a thousand francs to arrange his
affairs, without interest, upon his note for a trifle of eighteen
hundred, payable in six weeks.
Eight days after reaching London, Felix, established in a
fashionable hotel, was awaiting with nervous eagerness the first
instalment of a million, the proceeds of a cargo of teas, sold
under the direction of Mr. Harrison. He was too restless for
thought, burning with impatience to take possession of his
property, to handle his wealth, and, as it were, to verify his
dream. Yet the fact was indisputable. Richard Malden's death, and
his own relationship to the intestate had been legally proved and
established. Felix d'Aubremel regularly and assuredly inherited a
fortune, and he had no doubts nor scruples on that point.
A servant interrupted his reflections, announcing his solicitor's
clerk. "Why does not Mr. Harrison come himself?" he was on the
point of asking, but amazement at the clerk's appearance took
away his breath. He was a shriveled little object, slight, bony,
crooked and hideous, with a monstrous head and round eyes, a bald
skull, a flat nose, a mouth from ear to ear, and a little jutting
paunch that looked like a sack.
"I bring the Marquis d'Aubremel the monies he is expecting," said
the man, and his voice, shrill and silvery, like a musical box or
the bell of a clock, impressed Felix painfully. The voice grated
on the nerves. "I have drawn a receipt in regular form," said
Felix, extending his hand. But the solicitor's clerk leaned his
back against the door, without stirring a step. "Well, sir,"
Felix exclaimed with a convulsive effort. The man approached
slowly, scarcely moving his feet, as if sliding across the floor.
His right hand was buried in his coat pocket; he held his head
bent down, and his lips moved inaudibly. At last he pulled from
his pocket a large bundle of banknotes, bills and papers, drew
near the window, and began to count them carefully.
Felix was then struck by a strange phenomenon that might well
inspire undefined terror. Standing directly in front of the
window, the clerk's figure cast no shadow, though the sun's rays
fell full upon it, and through his human body, translucent as
rock crystal, Felix plainly saw the houses across the street.
Then his eyes seemed to be suddenly unsealed. The clerk's black
coat took colors, blue, green, and scarlet; it lengthened out
into the folds of a robe, and blazed with the dazzling image of
the fire-dragon, the son of Buddha; a lock of stiff grayish hair
sprouted like a short tuft out of his yellowish skull; his round
tawny eyes rolled with frightful rapidity in their sockets.
Felix recognized Li, son of Mung, son of Tseu, the literate
mandarin of the 114th class. The murderer had never seen his
victim, but could not doubt his identity a moment, thanks to the
marvelous resemblance between the solicitor's clerk and the china
monster that dropped into bits at his feet the night of January
12th, 1840.
Meantime the man had done counting his package, and held it out
to Felix, saying, in his grating, vibrating tones, "Monsieur le
Marquis, here are forty thousand pounds sterling; please to give
me your receipt." And Felix heard the voice say in a shriller
under-key, "Felix, here is an instalment of the million, the
price of your crime. Felix, my assassin, take this money from my
hand."
"From my hand," echoed a thousand fine voices, quivering all
through the air of the room.
"No, no," cried Felix, pushing the clerk away, "the money would
burn me! Begone with you!"
He dropped exhausted into a chair, half suffocated, with drops
of sweat rolling down his convulsed face. The man bowed to the
floor, and slowly moved away backwards. With every gradual step
Felix saw his natural shape return. The rays of the autumn sun
ceased to light up that mysterious apparition, and only
his attorney's humble clerk stood before Felix. With a rush
overpowering his will, Felix dashed after the old man, already
across the threshold, and overtook him on the staircase.
"My papers!" he shouted imperiously. "Here they are, sir," said
the old fellow quietly.
Felix regained his room, bolted the door, and counted the immense
sum contained in the pocket-book with excitement bordering on
frenzy. Then he bathed his burning head with cold water, and
threw an anxious look around the room.
"I must have had an attack of fever," he muttered.
[Illustration: A TROPIC FOREST.--GRANVILLE PERKINS]
"Mandarins don't rise from the dead, and a man can't kill another
by simply lifting his finger. So my philosopher talked like one
who knows nothing of moral experience. If the fancy of an unreal
crime almost drove me mad, what must be the remorse of an actual
criminal?"
The same evening Felix ordered post horses and set out for
France.
Some months later, Monsieur Montmorot, chevalier of the legion of
honor, gave a grand dinner to celebrate his daughter's betrothal
with the Marquis Felix d'Aubremel, one of the noblest names in
France, as he styled it. The contract settling a part of his
fortune on his daughter Ernestine was signed at nine in the
evening. The Monday following the pair presented themselves
before the civil officials to solemnize their marriage by due
legal ceremonies.
Felix, a prey to the strange hallucination that incessantly
pursued him, saw a likeness between the official and the Chinese
figure he had awkwardly thrown down and broken one night long
ago. Presently his face darkened, and his eyes began to burn.
Behind the magistrate's blue spectacles he caught the gleam and
roll of the tawny eyes belonging to Mr. Harrison's clerk, to Li,
son of Mung, son of Tseu.
When at length the magistrate put the formal question, "Felix
Etienne d'Aubremel, do you take for your wife Ernestine Juliette
Montmorot," Felix heard a shrill ringing voice say, "Felix, I
give you your wife with my hand--my hand."
The official repeated the question more loudly. "With my hand--my
hand," whispered a thousand mocking little voices.
"No!" Felix shouted rather than answered, and rushed away from
the spot like a lunatic.
Once more at home, he shut out everyone and flung himself on his
bed, in a state of stupor that weighed him down till night--a
sort of dull torpor of brain, with utter exhaustion of physical
strength--a misery of formless thought. Towards evening one
persistent idea aroused him from this strange lethargy.
"I am a cowardly murderer," he groaned. "I wished for my
fellow-being's death. God punishes me--I will execute his
sentence." He stretched out his hand in the dark, groping for a
dagger that hung from the wall. Then a mild brightness filtered
through the curtains and irradiated the bed. Felix distinctly saw
the grotesque figure of Mandarin Li standing a few steps away.
The shadow of death darkened his face, and without seeming
movement of his lips, Felix heard these words, uttered by that
shrill ringing voice so hated, now mellowed into divine music.
"Felix d'Aubremel, God does not will that you should die, and I,
his servant, am sent to tell you his decree. You have been cruel
and covetous--you have wished an innocent man's death, and his
death caused that of a multitude of victims to the barbarous
passions of a great western nation. Man's life must be sacred
for every man. God only can take what he gave. Live, then, if you
would not add a great crime to a great error. And if forgiveness
from one dead can restore in part your strength and courage to
endure, Felix, I forgive you."
The vision vanished.
Felix religiously obeyed the instructions of Li, and consecrated
his life by a vow to the relief of human misery wherever he
found it. He devoted Richard Malden's vast fortune to founding
charitable establishments. Ernestine Montmorot would never
consent to see him again.
Two years ago, yielding to an impulse easy to understand, he
requested the English consul at Chiusang to make inquiries as
to the family of Li, who might perhaps be suffering in poverty.
Nothing more could be discovered than that the gracious sovereign
of the Middle Kingdom had confiscated the property of Li's
family, that his wife had died of sorrow, in misery, and that
his son, Li, having taken the liberty to complain of the glorious
emperor's severity, suffered death by the bowstring, as is proper
and reasonable in all well-governed states.
* * * * *
[Illustration: MOTHER IS HERE!--DEIKER.]
MOTHER IS HERE!--A little fawn in the clutches of a fox bleats
loudly for help. The mother appears quickly on the scene, and
Renard retires, foiled and chagrined at the loss of his dinner.
He stays not upon the order of his going, but goes at once. The
artist Deiker is a well-known German painter, whose success with
these pictures of animal life ranks him with such men as Beckmann
and Hammer, whose names are familiar to the friends of _THE
ALDINE_.
_A TROPIC FOREST._
Trees lifted to the skies their stately heads,
Tufted with verdure, like depending plumage,
O'er stems unknotted, waving to the wind:
Of these in graceful form, and simple beauty,
The fruitful cocoa and the fragrant palm
Excelled the wilding daughters of the wood,
That stretched unwieldly their enormous arms,
Clad with luxuriant foliage, from the trunk,
Like the old eagle feathered to the heel;
While every fibre, from the lowest root
To the last leaf upon the topmost twig,
Was held by common sympathy, diffusing
Through all the complex frame unconscious life.
--_Montgomery's Pelican Island_.
* * * * *
What makes us like new acquaintances is not so much any weariness
of our old ones, or the pleasure of change, as disgust at not
being sufficiently admired by those who know us too well, and
the hope of being more so by those who do not know so much of
us.--_La Rochefoucauld_.
_AMONG THE DAISIES._
"Laud the first spring daisies--
Chant aloud their praises."--_Ed. Youl._
"When daisies pied and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver white--
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue,
Do paint the meadows with delight."
--_Shakspeare._
"Belle et douce Marguerite, aimable soeur du roi Kingcup,"
enthusiastically exclaims genial Leigh Hunt, "we would tilt for
thee with a hundred pens against the stoutest poet that did not
find perfection in thy cheek." And yet, who would have the heart
to slander the daisy, or cause a blush of shame to tint
its whiteness? Tastes vary, and poets may value the flower
differently; but a rash, deliberate condemnation of the daisy is
as likely to become realized as is a harsh condemnation of the
innocence and simplicity of childhood. So the chivalric Hunt need
not fear being invoked from the silence of the grave to take part
in a lively tournament for "belle et douce Marguerite."
Subjectively, the daisy is a theme upon which we love to linger.
In our natural state, when flesh and spirit are both models
of meekness, two objects are wont to throw us into a kind of
ecstasy: a row of nicely painted white railings, and a bunch of
fresh daisies. These waft us back along a vista of years, peopled
with scenes the most entrancing, and fancies the most pleasing.
They call up at once the old country home: the honeysuckle
clasping the thatched cottage, contrasting so prettily with the
white fence in front: the sloping fields of green painted with
daisies, through which, unshackled, the buoyant breeze swept so
peacefully. It was an invariable rule, in those days, to
troop through the meadows at early morn and, like a young
knight-errant, bear home in triumph "Marguerite," the peerless
daisy, rescued from the clutches of unmentionable dragons,
and now to beam brightly on us for the rest of the day from a
neighboring mantel-piece. And it was with great reluctance that
we refrained from decapitating the whole field of daisies at one
fell sweep, when we were once allowed to touch their upturned
faces. A contract was then made on the spot: we were permitted to
pluck the daisies on condition that we plucked but one every day.
The field was not large, and long before the blasts of autumn had
hushed the voices of the flowers, not a single daisy remained.
Advancing spring threw lavish handfuls once more on the grass,
and on these we sported anew with all the ardor of boyhood.
Our enthusiasm for the daisy then is only equaled by the
gratitude it now awakens. Too soon does the busy world, with
unwarrantable liberty, allure us from boyish scenes. Too soon are
the buoyant fancies of youth succeeded by the feverish anxieties
of age, happy innocence by the consciousness of evil, confidence
by doubt, faith by despair. We must chill our demonstrativeness,
restrain our affections, blunt our sensibilities. We must
cultivate conscience until we have too much of it, and become
monkish, savage and misanthropic. The asceticism of manhood is
apparent from the studied air with which everybody is on his
guard against his neighbor. In a crowded car, men instinctively
clutch their pockets, and fancy a pickpocket in a benevolent-looking
old gentleman opposite. When we see men so distrustful, we shun
them. They then call us selfish when we feel only solitary. We
protest against such manhood as would lower golden ideals of
youth to its own contemptible _Avernus_. And now as our daisy,
which is blooming before us, sagely nods its white crest as it is
swayed by the passing breeze, it seems to bring back of itself
decades gone forever. We never intend to become a man. We keep
our boy's heart ever fresh and ever warm. We don't care if the
whole human race, from the Ascidians to Darwin himself, assail us
and fiercely thrust us once more into short jackets and
knickerbockers, provided they allow an indefinite vacation in a
daisy field. The joy of childhood is said to be vague. It was all
satisfying to us once, and we do not intend to allow it to waste
in unconscious effervescence among the gaudier though less
gratifying delights of manhood.
It is, however, of daisies among the poets we would speak at more
length. In fact, to the imaginative mind, the daisy in poetry is
as suggestive as the daisy in nature. Philosophically, they are
identical; in the absence of the one you can commune with the
other. Thus unconsciously the daisy undergoes a metempsychosis;
its soul is transferred at will from meadow to book and from book
to meadow, without losing a particle of its vitality.
To premise with the daisy historically: Among the Romans it
was called _Bellis_, or "pretty one;" in modern Greece, it
is star-flower. In France, Spain, and Italy, it was named
"Marguerita," or pearl, a term which, being of Greek origin,
doubtless was brought from Constantinople by the Franks. From
the word "Marguerita," poems in praise of the daisy were termed
"Bargerets." Warton calls them "Bergerets," or "songs du Berger,"
that is, shepherd songs. These were pastorals, lauding fair
mistresses and maidens of the day under the familiar title of
the daisy. Froissart has written a characteristic Bargeret; and
Chaucer, in his "Flower and the Leaf," sings:
"And, at the last, there began, anone,
A lady for to sing right womanly,
A bargaret in praising the daisie;
For as methought among her notes sweet,
She said, 'Si douce est la Margarite."
Speght supposes that Chaucer here intends to pay a compliment to
Lady Margaret, King Edward's daughter, Countess of Pembroke, one
of his patronesses. But Warton hesitates to express a decided
opinion as to the reference. Chaucer shows his love for the daisy
in other places. In his "Prologue to the Legend of Good Women,"
alluding to the power with which the flowers drive him from his
books, he says that
"all the floures in the mede,
Than love I most these floures white and rede,
Soch that men callen daisies in our toun
To hem I have so great affectioun,
As I sayd erst, whan comen is the May,
That in my bedde there daweth me no day,
That I nam up and walking in the mede,
To seen this floure agenst the Sunne sprede."
To see it early in the morn, the poet continues:
"That blissfull sight softeneth all my sorow,
So glad am I, whan that I have presence
Of it, to done it all reverence
As she that is of all floures the floure."
Chaucer says that to him it is ever fresh, that he will cherish
it till his heart dies; and then he describes himself resting on
the grass, gazing on the daisy:
"Adowne full softly I gan to sink,
And leaning on my elbow and my side,
The long day I shope me for to abide,
For nothing els, and I shall nat lie,
But for to looke upon the daisie,
That well by reason men it call may
The daisie, or els the eye of day."
Chaucer gives us the true etymology of the word in the last line.
Ben Jonson, to confirm it, writes with more force than elegance,
"Days-eyes, and the lippes of cows;"
that is, cowslips; a "disentanglement of compounds,"--Leigh Hunt
says, in the style of the parodists:
"Puddings of the plum
And fingers of the lady."
The poets abound in allusions to the daisy. It serves both for
a moral and for an epithet. The morality is adduced more by
our later poets, who have written whole poems in its honor. The
earlier poets content themselves generally with the daisy
in description, and leave the daisy in ethics to such a
philosophico-poetical Titan as Wordsworth. Douglas (1471), in his
description of the month of May, writes:
"The dasy did on crede (unbraid) hir crownet smale."
And Lyndesay (1496), in the prologue to his "Dreme," describes
June
"Weill bordowrit with dasyis of delyte."
The eccentric Skelton, who wrote about the close of the 15th
century, in a sonnet, says:
"Your colowre
Is lyke the daisy flowre
After the April showre."
Thomas Westwood, in an agreeable little madrigal, pictures the
daisies:
"All their white and pinky faces
Starring over the green places."
Thomas Nash (1592), in another of similar quality, exclaims:
"The fields breathe sweet,
The daisies kiss our feet."
Suckling, in his famous "Wedding," in his description of the
bride, confesses:
"Her cheeks so rare a white was on
No daisy makes comparison."